Work on Fewer Projects and Get More Done

Bottle Neck

Good Intent Unintentionally Sabotaged – Have you observed this in your organization? Each year the Leadership Team goes through a planning process. With good intention, they launch a number of initiatives to achieve stretch goals. Work begins with great enthusiasm but soon becomes mired down. Reality hits, priorities are diluted and the rhythm of bureaucracy sets in.

“Idea darlings” are aggressively pursued by the Leadership Team and move to the front of the queue. The rest of the projects languish … or worse. Sure, as time permits they’re continually worked on. Yet they’re not predictably getting done. And perhaps worse, execution effectiveness drops off as expected organizational learning is lost and then repeatedly must be regained.

It is not uncommon for organizations to underperform on project intent. Many times there are simply too many things being worked on at once, consuming attention and resources, and giving rise to increasing conflicts and bottlenecks. Perhaps some of these situations sound familiar to you? [Read more]

Metrics are Scary and Should be Avoided at All Costs (Not)

Metrics are such an important element of continuous improvement. Wait…Metrics might be the most important element of continuous improvement. Why? Because continuous improvement by definition is the measurement of improvement — and if you aren’t measuring, how will the organization know how far it has come or where it needs to go?

Most organizations struggle mightily with the topic of metrics and sometimes it’s surprising just how much. I think it happens for a number of reasons. [Read more]

What if what’s in their best interest……doesn’t interest them?

salad

A very good post appeared on the FastCompany site yesterday, in which author Ginny Whitelaw declared, “Empathy is the most powerful leadership tool.”

There’s not a lot to disagree with in the article. It is, essentially, about Covey’s “seek first to understand” and represents both a practical, and I would say moralistic, way to approach your interactions with others. Seeing things from their point of view is a good thing, of course. It helps you to understand the other person better, so that you can align your message with their concerns. It’s a practical exercise for influencing others in any walks of life where negotiation, compromise, and change are necessary. It also indicates that you have a measure of respect for the other person’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately, there are times when people simply don’t act in a way that is consistent with what is in their best interests. Especially not in the long term. It’s as simple as David Meister’s Fat Smoker principle – you have to go through something difficult to get to something good, so change is hard and rarely happens. [Read more]

Project Management & Measurement gamed

Measurement

Project management tends to be all about outcome metrics. Tracking costs vs. plan, Earned Value, Cost and Schedule Performance Indices, consumed slack – all are about what happened. Granted, there’s an effort inherent to those practices that says the future can be predicted by understanding the past, however, that approach also seems to indicate that errors are acceptable. Especially if we read a bunch of charts and graphs and variance analyses to tell us that we had a problem some number of days, or weeks, ago.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem good enough. [Read more]

Position Yourself for Performance Transformation through a Fact-based Plan

By the time we meet most organizations, they want to get going with their transformation immediately. They often want to rush to implementation without a roadmap, resulting in the classic gotcha of “activity vs. action.” However, without clear direction, activity often swamps out action and fritters away resources fast. Few then remain to make a positive difference, and no lasting benefits accrue. To be effective, organizations need an implementation approach that predictably advances what their enterprise should be doing. [Read more]

Quick thoughts on the definition of excellence, and the weekly rewind

Excellence

It’s one of those days where what should be, and what is, are at odds with each other again…..

“Excellence” is something that ought to be defined objectively. There ought ot be agree-upon standards for excellence. In some cases there are, such as in sports where Excellence is defined as a team championship. Even then, however, excellence has a subjective interpretation – you might be a batting champion in baseball (meaning you have the highest individual batting average of any player), yet play for a last place team. A super star player might have sub-par statistics due to the poor team that surrounds him or her.

I think, if you ask almost any person, in any role, in any company what excellent means and they will tell you about their experience – and not necessarily about the standards within their profession. This may mean that, in reality, “excellence” becomes a locally-defined phenomenon, which is a mistake. [Read more]

Planning on not knowing

I had a conversation with a seasoned project / program manager the other day, that revealed some fundamental flaws in how people deal with uncertainty, as well as how the failure to embrace constant learning short changes both the individual and the group.  A few details have been changed to protect the guilty….. In discussing [...]

Swing and a Miss: On Failure

In baseball, batting .500 is pretty good right? In basketball or hockey, staying above .500 pretty well guarantees at least a run at the playoffs. But? Doesn’t that still mean that the remaining .500 were failures? There is a quotation that I have heard attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that states; ‘You miss 100% of the [...]

Article Review: Supply Chain at the C-level

  Michael Koplov over at softwareadvice.com contacted me last week to write a review of his article, Consumer-Driven Technology Creates the Need for a C-Level Supply Chain Focus. The article focuses on the ascension of Tim Cook to the CEO position at Apple, following Steve Jobs’ decision to step down from the position due to [...]

The recipe: From Estimating to Planning

Estimating is just one step along the way towards designing an executable project. The next thing that is necessary is a plan – and estimating is a quite different exercise from planning. A plan takes into account not just what needs to be done when, but how things move throughout the project, who moves them, when it will happen, what that movement enables or restricts, and an identification of what might change over the course of the project. [Read more]